PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 8
By:
Last week, the Ivy League lost one of its best basketball players. This week, it lost one of its best basketball coaches.
The two events are not unrelated.
Chris Young, the very tall and very talented center on the Princeton University basketball team, signed a contract last week to play professional baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates. As a result, he lost his eligibility under Ivy League rules to play two more years of college basketball.
The governing body of intercollegiate athletics – the National Collegiate Athletic Association – allows college athletes to retain their amateur standing in one sport even if they sign a professional contract to play another. But the Ivy League, alone among collegiate athletic conferences, prohibits such an arrangement.
Exit Chris Young.
This week, Bill Carmody, the very affable and very successful coach of the Princeton University basketball team, left to become head coach at Northwestern University. Acknowledging that taking over a team that won all of five games last season – none of them against a fellow member institution in the highly competitive Big Ten conference – represents a major challenge, he nevertheless bolted from a program in which he had compiled a four-year head coaching record of 92 wins against only 25 losses, including a gaudy 50-6 mark in the Ivy League.
One of the reasons Bill Carmody chose to leave is that Northwestern, unlike Princeton, offers athletic scholarships. Another is that the Big Ten, unlike the Ivy League, does not have its own set of arbitrary and capricious rules, far more onerous than the reasonable standards imposed by the NCAA, that disqualify talented athletes like Chris Young from participating in intercollegiate competition.
Don’t get us wrong. The NCAA is no paragon of virtue, and the "amateur" status of many college athletes is dubious at best. But the Ivy League rule that bars an athlete from playing one sport professionally and another at the intercollegiate level makes no sense to us at all. It evidently makes no sense to Chris Young or Bill Carmody either – and that is why Princeton and the Ivy League are losing two of their brightest stars.
The absurdity of the Ivy League rule is manifest. A Princeton athlete can spend the summer making a pile of money just about any way imaginable – interning at a Wall Street brokerage firm, working for a Fortune 500 company, writing for a national magazine, giving motivational speeches, selling used cars, playing in a rock and roll band, drilling for oil in Alaska – without losing his or her eligibility. But earn one penny from throwing a baseball and you can hang up your basketball sneakers forever.
Why? What’s the difference between an amateur basketball player earning money in the summer playing baseball for the Pirates or programming computers for IBM? If students have multiple talents, why shouldn’t they be allowed to profit from one without having to sacrifice the other? If Brooke Shields could get paid while she was an undergraduate for performing in movies and still participate in the annual Triangle show, why can’t Chris Young get paid for pitching for Pittsburgh without giving up his eligibility to shoot jump shots for Princeton?
The Ivy League presidents have it within their power to bring their conference (even if some stuffy alumni kick and scream about it) into the 21st century. In the wake of the Chris Young and Bill Carmody departures, Princeton University President Harold Shapiro would be the logical leader of such an effort. We hope he will pick up the mantle and work to instill in what is arguably the finest assemblage of intellectual institutions in the United States a small dose of common sense.